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Pentecost

Saturday, May 18th, 2013

“When the day of Pentecost came they were all together in one place…All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit.” (Acts 2:4) The effect upon Peter was startling. This disciple, who had denied His Lord with oaths and curses, stood up with the eleven and preached the first great evangelistic sermon of the Christian faith. About three thousand inquirers were added to the church that day. The only explanation was that the Holy Spirit, promised by Jesus (“you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you” Acts 1:8) had transformed Peter and used his personality and gifts to reach the multitudes with such convicting power that they were cut to the heart and repented and were baptized and asked to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit for themselves.

This incident, and every other one recorded, shows that the Filling of the Holy Spirit is for service. In each instance, the infilling was followed by strong action. The Filling of the Holy Spirit was not, is not, will not be given merely for private spiritual experience, but always for service.

Not only was the Apostle Peter filled on the day of Pentecost: they were all filled. John and James and Andrew and Phillip and Thomas and Bartholomew and Matthew and James and Simon and Judas and Matthias, all apostles; also James and Joses and Judas and Simon, the brothers of Jesus; and Mary the mother of Jesus, and Mary the mother of James and Joses, and Mary of Magdala, and Mary of Bethany, and Martha, and Joanna, and Susanna, and Salome, and other women who had been with the Lord in His ministry; a score of these who were filled were named for us, but a hundred others remain unnamed. The filling of the unnamed disciples is an encouragement to every humble Christian who might be tempted to think that the power from on high is for only ones whom God intends to exalt to leadership.

The Apostle Peter was filled with the Holy Spirit again, some days later. The filling of the Holy Spirit has a direct relationship with immediate service. There appear to be times of relaxation and rest in between times of being filled with power. The fullness of the Holy Spirit is under the sovereignty of the Spirit rather than the impulse of the believer.

The book of the Acts of the Apostles chronicles the acts of the Holy Spirit in the lives of people like Stephen, Philip, Saul of Tarsus, and others as they are filled with the Spirit. The filling of the Holy Spirit is given for preaching, for witnessing, for defense, for evangelism, for missionary work, for discernment, and for martyrdom.

What is the experience of the Filling of the Holy Spirit like? The Holy Spirit has been described in terms of fire, wind, water, and other natural elements, so it is possible to have an experience of the Spirit as consuming as a forest fire, as bending as a hurricane, or as gentle as a well of water bubbling up from the depths like a river.

What is the evidence of the Filling of the Holy Spirit? There is the extraordinary power of the proclamation of the Gospel resulting in the conversion of many people. But there is also the evidence of the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. When a Christian is filled with the Holy Spirit, his heart is full of love, full of joy, full of peace, full of patience, full of kindness, full of goodness, full of faithfulness, full of gentleness, and full of self-control. When these qualities are absent then you know that the person is not filled with the Holy Spirit.

There is also the evidence of the gifts of the Holy Spirit: wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, miracles, prophecy, discernment, tongues and interpretation. These are supernatural gifts, not just natural talents. No one person possesses all of them. The Holy Spirit apportions the gifts to each individually as He determines the need.

What actually is the Filling of the Holy Spirit? The Apostle Paul tells us: “Do not get drunk with wine…instead be filled with the Spirit.” (Ephesians 5:18) When a person gets drunk they lose control of themselves: a quiet man can become rowdy, a mean man can become generous, a decent man can become indecent, a cautious man can become reckless: and people excuse him by saying that he is not himself, he is intoxicated. The filling of the Holy Spirit is God-intoxication; not fanaticism, but the possession of the person’s faculties by the Holy Spirit of God, so that he is led to behave as God would want him. The fruit of the Spirit is the very opposite of extravagance or fanaticism.

How does one seek to be filled with the Spirit? Jesus told his disciples: “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, but how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him.” (Luke 11:13) “Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.” (Luke 11:9) An asking, seeking, knocking Christian will soon find out for himself what stands in the way of his being filled with the Holy Spirit. Sometimes we are led to seek forgiveness, and to surrender our lives anew to God.

I ask for the Spirit to fill me every morning. I know how empty I can be. I know how full of myself I can become. I know how difficult it is to produce the fruit of the Spirit. “I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do – this I keep on doing.” (Romans 7:19) It is only the Spirit of God who lives in us, who can enable us to do that which is good.  I am powerless of myself to help myself. I cannot do it on my own. The more I try in my own strength, the more I fail. That is why the filling of the Spirit is so crucial.

God cannot fill us with his Spirit if we are full of ourselves. We need to be aware of our own need enough, aware of our own deficiencies enough, and want to become a better person enough, that we will ask to be filled with the Holy Spirit.

“Lord I am a child that has no knowledge, so teach me;

And blind and see not the way, so lead me:

And weak, most weak to choose rightly, so supply your power:

And love myself too well, so show me, give me love, true love, fill me with your Spirit.”

Eric Milner-White

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Ash Wednesday

Wednesday, January 30th, 2013

Ash Wednesday, and the season of Lent which it begins, calls us to pause and reflect on the significance of our lives. If, we are to remember that we are but dust, and to dust we shall return, what is the meaning and purpose of this life between birth and death?

In  his novel, Revolution Road, made into the award-winning movie starring Leonardo de Caprio and Kate Winslett, Richard Yates, portrays a young couple who are trying to find themselves, and be something special, rather than just be caught up in a mindless suburban family life, or a the anonymous corporate life in New York City. They want to follow their dreams of going to live in Paris, but events transpire to prevent them. Tragedy ensues as they settle for the safe option. In all the discussion about finding their true selves, there is no mention of God or his will for their lives. There is no faith, no sense of purpose or divine destiny.

In contrast to them, Thomas Merton chose another route. He left the rat-race and entered into a monastery, and became a world-renowned writer of more than 60 books of poetry, meditation, philosophy and social criticism. Here is his take on our meaning and purpose.

“Each one of us has some kind of vocation. We are all called by God to share in His life and in His Kingdom. Each one of us is called to a special place in the Kingdom. If we find that place we will be happy. If we do not find it , we can never be completely happy. For each one of us, there is only one thing necessary: to fulfill our own destiny, according to God’s will, to be what God wants us to be.

Why do we have to spend our lives striving to be something that we would never want to be, if only we knew what we wanted? Why do we waste our time doing things which, if we only stopped to think about them, are just the opposite of what we were made for?

We cannot be ourselves unless we know ourselves. But self-knowledge is impossible when thoughtless and automatic activity keeps our souls in confusion. In order to know ourselves it is not necessary to cease all activity in order to think about ourselves. That would be useless, and would probably do most of us a great deal of harm. But we have to cut down our activity to the point where we can think calmly and reasonably about our actions. We cannot begin to know ourselves until we can see the real reasons why we do the things we do, and we cannot be ourselves until our actions correspond to our intentions, and our intentions are appropriate to our own situation. But that is enough. It is not necessary that we succeed in everything. A man who fails well is greater than one who succeeds badly.

We cannot be happy if we expect to live all the time at the highest peak of intensity. Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.

Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm. If we strive to be happy by filling all the silences of life with sound, productive by turning all life’s leisure into work, and real by turning all our being into doing, we will only succeed in producing hell on earth.

If we have no silence, God is not heard in our music. If we have no rest, God does not bless our work. If we twist our lives out of shape in order to fill every corner of them with action and experience, God will silently withdraw from our hearts and leave us empty.

Let us, therefore, learn to pass from one imperfect activity to another without worrying too much about what we are missing. It is true that we make many mistakes. But the biggest of them all is to be surprised at them: as if we had some hope of never making any.

Mistakes are part of our life, and not the least important part. If we are humble, and if we believe in the Providence of God, we will see our mistakes are not merely a necessary evil, something we must lament and count as lost: they enter into the very structure of our existence. It is by making mistakes that we gain experience, not only for ourselves but for others. And though our experience prevents neither ourselves nor others from making the same mistake many times, the repeated experience still has positive value.

We cannot avoid missing the point of almost everything we do. But what of it? Life is not a matter of getting something out of everything. Life itself is imperfect. The relative perfection which we must attain to in this life if we are to love as sons of God is not the twenty-four-hour-a-day production of perfect acts of virtue, but a life from which practically all the obstacles to God’s love have been removed or overcome.

One of the chief obstacles to this perfection of selfless charity is the selfish anxiety to get the most out of everything, to be a brilliant success in our own eyes and in the eyes of other men. We can only get rid of this anxiety by being content to miss something in almost everything we do. We cannot master everything, taste everything, understand everything, understand everything, drain every experience to its last dregs. But if we have the courage to let almost everything else go, we will probably be able to obtain the one thing necessary for us – whatever it may be. If we are too eager to have everything, we will almost certainly miss even the one thing we need.

Happiness consists in finding out precisely what the ‘one thing necessary’ may be, in our lives, and in gladly relinquishing all the rest, For each one of us, there is only one thing necessary: to fulfill our own destiny, according to God’s will, to be what God wants us to be.”

(Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island, pp.125-131)

May you this Lent, find out precisely the one thing necessary for you, so that you may be what God wants you to be, and so fulfill your own destiny.

 

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The Long Game

Thursday, November 8th, 2012

Andrew Klavan
The Long Game
Three areas the Right should address, financially and intellectually
7 November 2012
Life is short, said Hippocrates, but art is long. There is a practical corollary to that great truth: elections are won and lost in the politics of the moment, but it’s the culture that makes the nation.
In the aftermath of President Obama’s victory, conservative political thinkers will have to ask themselves some hard questions. How much of our defeat was due to strategy and how much to structure? How can we reach out to struggling workers without sacrificing our commitment to free enterprise and individual liberty? How can we speak to single women without losing voters committed to family values and the lives of the unborn? How can we welcome the children of illegal immigrants without compromising our belief in the rule of law?
The smartest political writers in the country, all of whom are conservative, will now be addressing those questions. I’m an artist; I play the long game. To win that game, to create an electorate more deeply committed to true liberty and resistant to the sort of cultural scare tactics the president’s campaign team used so effectively, there are three areas to which conservatives need to commit intellectual and financial resources—three areas that our intelligentsia and funders, in their impractical practicality, too often ignore.
The mainstream news media. Major news outlets, like ABC, NBC, CBS, and the still influential New York Times have now become so ideologically corrupt that they are engaging in the sort of Nixonian cover-ups they once prided themselves on exposing. Their studied creation of non-scandal scandals and non-gaffe gaffes on the right and their active suppression of such true scandals as Fast and Furious and Benghazi on the left amount to journalistic malpractice on behalf of the state. The late Andrew Breitbart understood the depth and extent of the problem better than the cooler establishment heads who wrinkled their noses at him. He declared a guerrilla war on the media in the name of truth.
While Breitbart disciples like John Nolte, Ben Shapiro, and Joel Pollak continue that underground fight, it is long past time for conservative minds and money to take the battle to the mainstream. How is it possible that the mind-boggling success of Fox News has failed to spawn half a dozen imitators at least—especially venues for the libertarian young with their antic sense of political incorrectness? Rupert Murdoch, God love him, can’t live forever. It’s time for others to step up.
The entertainment industry. Conservatives think when they have won an argument in the newspapers, the fight is over. Leftists know their Hippocrates. They know they can rewrite history in novels, on TV, and in the movies, and a generation later, their false versions will be accepted as truth. As former ambassador Joseph Wilson said, when his questionable actions were rendered heroic in the dishonest movie Fair Game: “For people who have short memories or don’t read, this is the only way they will remember the period.” It’s not that conservative ideas don’t make their way into popular entertainment; it’s that they always come in disguise. Even leftists love deeply conservative films like the Lord of the Rings and Dark Knight trilogies, because they recognize good values when they’re not forced to apply them to real life. But conservatives themselves quail when conservatives speak their values plainly in the arts. Too preachy, they cry, too much propaganda, too much . . . too much . . . conservatism! We don’t need more conservative artists. We need an infrastructure to support them: more funding, more distribution, sympathetic review venues, grants and awards for arts that speak the truth out loud.
Religion for intellectuals. Normally, I would have said number three was “reforming the academy,” but I believe this is where the fight for the academy is centered. Recently, a number of books by secular intellectuals have noted the disaster that is postmodern relativism—the nihilist philosophy that has corrupted and gutted Western liberal education. Education’s End, by Anthony T. Kronman, Why We Should Call Ourselves Christians, by Marcello Pera, and What Ever Happened to Modernism?, by Gabriel Josipovici, come to mind. All lament the abandonment of our commitment to the Great Conversation—the intellectual’s belief that the creative tension of the uniquely brilliant Western literary and philosophical canon can lead us in the direction of moral truth.
But the authors cannot fully grasp the nettle of the solution. Many assume that the Great Conversation depended on the sort of open mind only secularism can provide. As Kronman puts it: “Every religion insists, at the end of the day, that there is only one right answer to the question of life’s meaning,” thus rendering the pluralism of the Great Conversation impossible. I would contend the opposite: only the existence of a God in whose image we are created can support the notion of moral truth at all. It was always Judeo-Christianity, and that alone, that made the Great Conversation possible. Pera understands this intellectually, but cannot really plunk for faith. And therein lies the problem. The triumph of science, the comfort of Western life, and a sophisticated elite virulently hostile to religion have all contributed to an intellectual atmosphere of unbelief—a sense that atheism should be the default mode of reasonable, thinking people. That is a mere prejudice and needs to be answered in the culture, not with Bible-thumping literalism and small-minded judgmentalism—nor with banal happy-talk optimism—but by sound argument made publicly, unabashedly, and without fear. John Adams and the other Founders were right about this: an irreligious people cannot be free. Liberty lives in the palace of moral truth, and you can’t build that palace on the empty air.
In the aftermath of a crushing electoral defeat, all this may seem a distant business, an airy conversation for another day. It isn’t. The demography of the country is changing, but demography is not destiny. Ideas are. We must retake the culture and begin speaking truth to a new America.
Andrew Klavan’s new suspense novel for young adults is entitled If We Survive.

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E. M. Bounds

Saturday, October 27th, 2012
I have recently been re-reading E.M. Bounds, Power Through Prayer. I read it when I was young and it had a great effect upon me. It is a small book of great power. Reading it again has blessed me to such a degree that I ordered his Complete Works on Prayer and am hungrily devouring it chapter by chapter each morning in my devotional time. I recommend it highly. Since I did not know much about Bounds I found the Wikipedia article on him illuminating. He married a lady from Washington, Georgia and spent his last years there writing his books. Here is the article. Read his books. They will electrify you and nourish your prayer life.
Edward McKendree Bounds
E.M. Bounds

Edward McKendree Bounds (circa 1864)
Born (1835-08-15)August 15, 1835
Died August 24, 1913(1913-08-24) (aged 78)
Occupation Methodist minister; evangelist; revivalist; author; army
chaplain; lawyer
Religion Methodist Episcopal Church, South
Spouse(s) Emma Elizabeth Barnett (m. 1876-1886); Harriet Elizabeth Barnett
(m. 1887-1913)
Edward McKendree Bounds ((1835-08-15)August 15, 1835 – August 24, 1913(1913-08-24) was a clergyman of the Methodist Episcopal Church South and author of eleven books, nine of which focused on the subject of prayer.
Shortly after his father’s death in 1849, Edward, his eldest brother (Charles), and several other relatives joined a wagon train and traveled to Mesquite Canyon in California in hopes of making a fortune in gold mining. After four unsuccessful years, they returned to Missouri and Edward studied law in Hannibal, Missouri. He became the state’s youngest practicing lawyer at age nineteen.[4] Although apprenticed as an attorney, Bounds felt called to Christian ministry in his early twenties during the Third Great Awakening. Following a brush arbor revival meeting led by Evangelist Smith Thomas, he closed his law office and moved to Palmyra, Missouri to enroll in the Centenary Seminary. Two years later, in 1859 at the age of 24, he was ordained by his denomination and was named pastor of the nearby Monticello, Missouri Methodist Church.[5][6]
Civil War Chaplain
E.M. Bounds did not support slavery. But, because he was a pastor at a congregation in the recently formed Methodist Episcopal Church South, his name was included in a list of 250 names who were to take an oath of allegiance and post a $500 bond. Edward saw no reason for a U.S. Citizen to take such an oath, he was morally opposed to the Union raising funds in this way, and he didn’t have the $500.[7] Bounds and the others on the list were arrested in 1861 by Union troops, and Bounds was charged as a  Confederate sympathizer. He was held with other non-combatants in a Federal prison in St.Louis for a year and a half. He was then transferred to Memphis and released in a prisoner exchanged between the Union and the Confederacy.[8]
He became a chaplain in the Confederate States Army (3rd Missouri Infantry CSA).[9] During the Second Battle of Franklin, Bounds suffered a severe forehead injury from a Union saber, and he was taken prisoner. On June 28, 1865, Bounds was among Confederate prisoners who were released upon the taking of an oath of loyalty to the United States.[10]
Pastor and Author
Upon his release as a prisoner of the Union Army, he felt compelled to return to war-torn Franklin and help rebuild it spiritually, and he became the pastor of the Franklin Methodist Episcopal Church, South. His primary method was to establish weekly prayer sessions that sometimes lasted several hours. Bounds was regionally celebrated for leading spiritual revival in Franklin and eventually began an itinerant preaching ministry throughout the country.
After serving several important churches in St. Louis and other places, south, he became Editor of the St. Louis Christian Advocate for eight years and, later, Associate Editor of The Nashville Christian Advocate for four years. The trial of his faith came to him while in Nashville, and he quietly retired to his home without asking even a pension. His principal work in Washington, Georgia (his home) was rising at 4 am and praying until 7 am. He filled a few engagements as an evangelist during the eighteen years of his lifework. While on speaking engagements, he would not neglect his early morning time in prayer, and cared nothing for the protests of the other occupants of his room at being awakened so early. No man could have made more melting appeals for lost souls and backslidden ministers than did Bounds. Tears ran down his face as he pleaded for us all in that room.[11]
According to people who were constantly with him, in prayer and preaching, for eight years “Not a foolish word did we ever hear him utter. He was one of the most intense eagles of God that ever penetrated the spiritual ether. He could not brook delay in rising, or being late for dinner. He would go with me to street meetings often in Brooklyn and listen to the preaching and sing with us those beautiful songs of Wesley and Watts. He often reprimanded me for asking the unconverted to sing of Heaven. Said he: ‘They have no heart to sing, they do not know God, and God does not hear them. Quit asking sinners to sing the songs of Zion and the Lamb.’”
E.M. Bounds died on August 24, 1913 in Washington, Georgia.
Further reading
King, Darrel D. “E.M. Bounds  (Men of Faith)”, Bethany House, 1998.
Dorsett, Lyle W. “E. M. Bounds: Man of Prayer”, Zondervan (September 1991) (ISBN-10: 0310539315)
Bounds, E.M. “The Complete  Works of E. M. Bounds on Prayer:

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Protestant Decline in America?

Saturday, October 13th, 2012

- The Gospel Coalition Blog -
http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc -

6 Reflections on Protestant Decline in America

Posted By Don Sweeting On October 11, 2012

Protestants have lost their majority status in the United States, and the number of Americans with no religious affiliation is rising. Those are the two big conclusions of a recently released study of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life in America. [1]

For the first time in American history, the United States does not have a Protestant majority. The adult Protestant population reached a new low of 48 percent. That’s down from the 1960s when two in three Americans identified themselves as Protestants. The report records declines in both mainline and evangelical numbers, and that many of these people have joined the ranks of “the Nones,” those who say they have no religion (now one in five Americans).

Reading deeper into the study, I wondered about two things. The study counted among the “Nones” those who say they believe in God, pray, and are spiritual but are not religious. I wonder if the study recognized that many evangelical Christians define themselves in this way—we often say (rather simplistically) “our church is not about religion, but about a relationship with God in Christ.” I also questioned when the study said the number of Protestants has decreased in part due to the growth of non- denominational churches. I know many non-denominational groups that consider themselves Protestant. And I know many non-denominational groups that do not emphasize being Protestant but still act and believe in Protestant ways. But I also know many non-denominational Christians who really aren’t Protestant at all, which makes counting this demographic difficult.

Even so, I do not doubt the broad trend that the Pew study has identified. In fact,the reality may be worse than what the Pew study suggests. In his recent book Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics [2], New York Times columnist Ross Douthat writes about the slow-motion collapse of traditional Christianity in America. He argues that Christian orthodoxy is losing ground to the many ascendant heresies of our day—new Gnosticism, prosperity gospel, new sects, spiritual narcissism, nationalism, and so on.

Why this trend? The Pew report only touches on a few of the reasons—but all kinds of causes have been suggested: a move away from the gospel, failure of Christians to live out their faith, identifying Christianity too closely with politics, suffocating materialism, the pluralism of our global age, a spiritual but post-Christian worldview pumped to the young through countless new media portals.

This trend does not quite fit the old secularization thesis—that societies become less religious the more modern they become. Spirituality and religious pluralism in America are on the rise. Nor does this trend say anythingabout the overall decline of Christianity. Because while Christianity is declining in the West, it is growing in the Global South and East.

Cause for Reflection

Nevertheless, American Christian leaders need to reflect long and hard about the trend that Pew is reporting. Here are a few quick observations.

(1) This is another reminder denominationalism is in decline.

Identification with a Protestant label such as Presbyterian or Baptist is no longer valued by many, and in some cases it is seen as a hindrance to Christian witness. That said, I am part of a denomination and think healthy denominations are still quite useful. But I realize that the trend is going in the other direction.

(2) Protestants (even evangelicals) have done a poor job of imprinting our identity on our children.

We have either focused on spiritual vibrancy without catechizing, or catechized without emphasizing spiritual vibrancy. Either way, we have lost ground with our youth. Church leaders need to think doubly hard about how we are going to reach and train up the next generation of Christians. We have to rethink the way we do children’s and youth ministry.

(3) There are three wrong responses to this Protestant decline.

One is to batten down the hatches and adopt a fortress mentality when it comes to our culture. Another is to emphasize a lowest common denominator Christianity that insists on as little as possible of Christian truth in order to connect with secular audiences. Still another is to redefine central tenets of the Christian faith and so accommodate the faith to the late modern world.

In contrast to these approaches, I believe we need to affirm a robust orthodox Christianity, even a confessional Christianity, that keeps Christ and the gospel central to everything we do and say. It should be confessional, but center focused; it should be gracious and not doctrinally belligerent on peripheral concerns.

(5) We need to re-examine how we define Christian discipleship in a culture coming apart.

The early Christians might help us here. They were known for their distinct way of life. They could tell others that following Jesus is a better way to live. Perhaps that is why they were called people of “the way.” The whole era of the early church is more and more relevant to our new cultural setting. They had the challenge of living for Christ in a pluralistic, pagan, pre-Christian environment. We have the challenge of living for Christ in a pluralistic, neo-pagan, post Christian environment. We can learn a lot from the early church.

(6) Some of us are used to thinking of America in Jerusalem or New Jerusalem-like categories.

Without being postmillennial about it, we grew up with the “city on the hill” image. Yet as our culture changes, some aspects of our society are starting to look a lot more like Babylon than Jerusalem. We are looking more like a mission field than a mission-sending center. In terms of evangelism, we can no longer assume that everyone around us is a theist who can draw on long-forgotten Sunday school lessons. More and more people have no church background at all. All of this means that we really do need to live and think like missionaries as our neighborhoods are populated with Muslims, Mormons, spiritualists, and Nones.

The Pew study is another cultural indicator. Take note of it. Talk about it with other Christian leaders. And get ready for the wonderful yet incredible challenge ahead of us—to be truly Christian in this new environment.

Article printed from The Gospel Coalition Blog: http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc

URL to article: http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2012/10/11/6-reflections-on-protestant-decline-in-america/

URLs in this post:

[1] Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life in America.: http://www.pewforum.org/Unaffiliated/nones-on-the-rise.aspx

[2] Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics: http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Religion-Became-Nation%20Heretics/dp/1439178305?tag=thegospcoal-20

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The Priority of Prayer

Thursday, September 6th, 2012

I have recently read with great profit, The Pleasures of God: Meditations on God’s Delight in Being God, by John Piper, who is a pastor and author in Minneapolis. In the chapter entitled, The Pleasure of God in the Prayers of the Upright, he makes the distinction between what appears to be the real battle of life: divorce, death, disagreement, sickness, family problems etc., and the main battle: the war against the spiritual forces of evil who hold captive so many of God’s people (“that they will come to their senses and escape the trap of the devil, who has taken them captive to do his will.” 2 Timothy 2:26). He writes, “And so the minefields must be crossed, the barbed wire cut, the snipers evaded and gospel antidotes for Satan’s mind-altering drugs administered against immense opposition (Luke 21:12-19).”

“So again I ask, ‘How will the church every come to think this way? How will millions of lukewarm churchgoers be brought to wartime readiness and put on military alert? How can the massive mentality of American prosperity, peace with the world, and family comfort ever be overcome?’

I believe the answer, beneath and behind the renewed empowering of the Word of God, is a movement of persevering, believing, expectant prayer. Because it is prayer that opens our hearts to the surpassing worth of God (Ephesians 1:17f.), and makes us feel the height and depth of Christ’s love (Ephesians 3:18). It’s prayer that makes us love lost people (1 Thessalonians 3:12) and have a passion for righteousness (Philippians 1:11). It’s prayer that opens doors for the gospel (Colossians 4:3) and brings in the recruits (Matthew 9:38), and makes them bold (Ephesians 6:19). It’s prayer that protects from the enemy (Romans 15:31; Matthew 6:13) and makes the Word of God run and be glorified (2 Thessalonians 3:1).

Prayer is the walkie-talkie on the battlefield of the world. It calls on God for courage. It calls in for troop deployment and target location (Acts 13:1-3). It calls in for protection and air cover (Matthew 6:13; Luke 21:36). It calls in for firepower to blast open a way for the Word (Colossians 4:3). It calls in for the miracle of healing for the wounded soldiers (James 5:16). It calls in for supplies for the forces (Matthew 6:11; Philippians 4:6). And it calls in for needed reinforcements (Matthew 9:38). This is the place of prayer – on the battlefield of the world. It is a wartime walkie-talkie for spiritual warfare, not a domestic intercom to increase the comforts of the saints. And one of the reasons it malfunctions in the hands of so many Christian soldiers is that they have gone AWOL.

God has given us prayer because Jesus has given us a mission. God’s pleasure in the prayers of his people is proportionate to his passion for world evangelization. We are on this earth to press back the forces of darkness, and we are given access to Headquarters by prayer in order to advance this cause. When we try to turn it into a civilian intercom to increase our material comforts, it malfunctions, and our faith begins to falter.”

If we want family, friends, co-workers and neighbors to come to Christ, and join our fellowship of faith, we must be prepared to pray for them, that God will change their hearts. If we believe that faith in Christ, in St. Paul’s words, “depends not upon man’s will or exertion, but upon God’s mercy” (Romans 9:16), we will pray that he will have mercy on them. We will pray:

“God, take out of their lives the heart of stone and give them a new heart of flesh.” (Ezekiel 11:19)

“Lord, circumcise their heart so that they love you.” (Deuteronomy 30:6)

“Father, put your Spirit within them and cause them to walk in your statutes.” (Ezekiel 36:27)

“Lord, grant them repentance and a knowledge of the truth that they may escape the snare of the devil.” (2 Timothy 2:25,26)

“Father, open their hearts so that they believe the gospel.” (Acts 16:14)

Let us pray for our loved ones that they may come to know the love of God in Christ Jesus.

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P.T. Forsyth and the Temptation and Error Facing the Church

Saturday, August 25th, 2012

What is the mission of the Church? For many in the mainline denominations, including my own, it is to primarily respond to the material needs of the poor and the seemingly powerless, those who appear to be victims of our society. Social justice is certainly a Christian concern and we are called to love our neighbor as ourselves.  But is the Church just another non-governmental agency (NGO)? No, it is not. Social justice concerns are the result of evangelism and the proclamation of the Gospel of Christ, not a substitute for it.

A New Zealand friend of mine, Dale Oldham, sent me a quote from P.T. Forsyth to explain why the church in New Zealand got off track and has declined in influence and outreach within our lifetime. It is headed the Temptation and Error Facing the Church.

“It was what still makes, and always has made, the chief temptation of his Church – the reformation of society by every beneficent means except the evangelical; by amelioration, by reorganization, by programs and policies, instead of by the soul’s new creation, and its total conversion from the passion for justice to the faith of grace, from what makes man just with each other to what makes them just with God. It was the temptation to save men by rallying their goodness without routing their evil, by re-organizing virtue instead of redeeming guilt. It is the error in a Church which preoccupies men with their rights rather than their mercies, with redress rather than redemption, with social change where it is men that must be changed if society is to be saved, with their brotherhood to each other when the thing lacking is their sonship to God, with goodness rather than grace, with religion rather than faith, is the error which leads men to think that we can have a new Church or Humanity upon any other condition than the renovation of the soul of the new covenant which Christ founded in his last hours, before the very Church was founded, and which is the Church’s one foundation in his most precious blood.”

P.T. Forsyth (1848-1921) was a British Congregational theologian. This extract comes from his greatest work, The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, p.303.

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Does God Care About Sports?

Saturday, March 31st, 2012

Timothy Dalrymple, in his blog on Patheos writes about Tim Tebow and Jeremy Lin. I commend it to you.

“Isn’t it degrading to suggest that God cares about sports? Isn’t that anthropomorphizing? Are we, like the ancient Greeks with their stories of gods who did all sorts of silly and petty and naughty things, really supposed to imagine that God dons a cheese-wedge upon his head and roots for the Packers?

With war and famine, death and disease, doesn’t God have better things to do? Aren’t sports beneath his dignity, unworthy of his time and station?

In the process of writing Jeremy Lin: The Reason for the Linsanity (official release date is May 8th), I had abundant opportunity to reflect upon these things. Tim Tebow had been congratulated by many in the media for not talking as though “God gave us the victory.” He thanked God less for the outcome of games than for the opportunity to play in them. When Jeremy Lin first came upon the scene, there were some criticisms even when “Linsanity” was at fever pitch. Jeremy seemed to talk as though God were involved in his basketball career in very intimate ways — as though God not only gave him abilities and opportunities, but gave him successful outcomes — hitting a shot, having a great night, getting the win.

Jeremy’s spiritual mentors and teachers have generally been Reformed. The books he cites as favorites are from John Piper and C.J. Mahaney, and Jeremy’s reflections on his life and career consistently refer to a close and careful divine sovereignty. It’s what theologians have called providentia specialissima, God’s most fine-grained care in the minutiae of our lives.

When people protest the notion that God should care about sports, they tend to be (1) atheists or agnostics who doubt God’s existence in the first place and find the notion of God caring about sports particularly ridiculous, (2) de facto Deists who believe that God created the order of things and then sits back to watch it all unwind, (3) people of faith who believe that God guides history (through natural or supernatural means) in the broadest sense but does not get involved in the sordid details, or (4) just people of faith who really haven’t thought it through.

Of course God cares about sports. The Christian God is not a God who refuses to get in the trenches, not a God whose dignity prohibits him from getting involved in the sordid details of human life. The single most distinctive doctrine in all of Christianity is the doctrine of the Incarnation. Not that God drinks and frolics in the heavens, but that God entered into history as a human being, fully God and fully man, sinless but suffering, enduring all the meager indignities of human existence. This was the scandal of Christ in the ancient world — a God who stooped into the muck of our common condition, who entered the world in the blood and detritus of birth, an incarnate God who (not to put too fine a point on it) had runny noses and infections and diarrhea and who got that goop you get in your eyes in the morning. He died naked and mostly abandoned, with spit and blood and grime upon his body, with thorns puncturing the crown of his head and nails piercing his hands and feet, and…well, I could go on.

God cares about the details, if for no other reason, because God cares about us. We should affirm common grace: that just as God ordains the sun to shine upon the righteous and the wicked alike, God ordains victory for believers and unbelievers. God does not simply give the victory to the most righteous individual or team upon the field. We should make clear that we cannot manipulate the outcome, as though the right formula of prayers and genuflections and “aw shucks” humility can compel God to grant victory. But we should also affirm, whether or not we’re Reformed, that God cares about the details and working through sports is not beneath God’s dignity.

Perhaps we can be a bit more precise. God does not care about sports in themselves. God cares about the people who play them. God cares about the people who watch and enjoy sports and whose lives are affected by sports. And God works through sports, as God works through all things, for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose. Training the body is, or can be, a profound and necessary school for the spirit. And in today’s age, when so many Christians live lives of comfortable complacency, when the rigor and striving of faith have been so terribly deemphasized, sports can serve an important role in reminding us of the importance of discipline and collective sacrifice in the pursuit of a greater goal.

So if sports can help us grow closer to God and more mature in our faith — and they can — then yes, God cares about sports for what can be accomplished through them.

What, then, can be accomplished through them? How do sports help us, as athletes and as spectators, to understand God, to witness God, to love and live with God better? Tune in tomorrow for my thoughts on that question.”

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Innocent Suffering

Saturday, January 21st, 2012

Thomas G. Long, Bandy Professor of Preaching as Candler School of Theology, Emory University, has done it again. He has a habit of writing books on subjects that are pertinent to today. This time it is about innocent suffering. WHAT SHALL WE SAY? EVIL, SUFFERING, AND THE CRISIS OF FAITH, tackles head on the contention that a good God, who is all-powerful should not allow undeserved evil. In particular he responds to Bart Ehrman’s book, GOD’S PROBLEM: HOW THE BIBLE FAILS TO ANSWER OUR MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION – WHY WE SUFFER.

He reviews all the major arguments over the centuries and recent books on the subject, including those of the new atheists: Hitchens and Dawkins, and Harold Kushner’s sympathetic, WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE. His aim is to encourage preachers to deal with the difficult challenges of unbelief from the pulpit and to avoid bromides.

“There they are out there in the pews, people who want to believe but who are plagued with honest doubts, people who are remind-ed every day in ways explicit and implicit that their faith in a God who loves humanity and acts in the world benevolently is merely the ‘unresolved residue of childish fantasy,’ people who are pressed by the powerful ideology of science and the pressure of a secular culture to pack their bags and to head out ‘East of Eden’ along the road of unbelief, but who leave reluctantly and with re-gret and nostalgia, looking back as they go to see if someone, anyone, will speak a word that kindles their faith once again and gives them hope that God is alive and that life is more than a flat, technological world ruled by raw human ambition and power and pun-ctuated by random and meaningless suffering.” (p.29)

He has some wonderful stories to tell – excellent witnesses to the spiritual mysteries that transcend our understanding and exper-ience. He is aware that every day people in congregations face suffering for which their theology is not sufficient. They want to know that God loves them, and want to be shown how. After discussing all the arguments, and the book of Job, he ends by explor-ing the teaching of Jesus in the parable of the wheat and the weeds (Matthew 13:24-30). Jesus locates the presence of evil to the work of the enemy, the devil. “To say that the enemy is the devil is not to revert to pre-scientific fairytale images but to say, through the ancient language of the Scripture, that evil has a cosmic, trans-human reality. Evil is not just a failing; it is a force….Evil is not merely a problem; it is a mystery…It is cosmic because it recognizes that evil is a spiritual force; it is not just a result of human err-or, natural forces, and understandable conflict, but is rather a force that transcends human capacities and rational explanation …. God’s enemy is a constant presence and a fact of life.” (134-137)

In my book SURVIVING HURRICANES I say the same thing. The problem of innocent suffering is really the problem of evil, the enemy, the devil, the cosmic fall. We have to endure it in this present age until the harvest, when the wheat will be separated from the weeds.

I commend Long’s book. It is superb. Anyone who has wrestled with the problems of natural disasters and the evil of human beings, accidents and disease, will find it a great comfort.

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The Iron Lady

Wednesday, January 18th, 2012

The movie Iron Lady begins with Meryl Streep portraying an elderly Margaret Thatcher buying a carton of milk at a convenience store. Nobody know her. Young men of different ethnicities bustle around her without giving her a moment’s notice. She has escaped her caregivers and experienced the world that has moved on since her time of fame as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

The movie chronicles her life with a series of flashbacks as she carries on imaginary conversations with her deceased husband Dennis. It is a picture of old age, nostalgia, and the need to maintain some sense of dignity and value as a person when you are challenged with confusion and the accumulation of the multitude of lifetime memories.

It also presents how one woman made her way in a man’s world of politics through convictions learned from her father, a grocer in a small English town. She wanted to make a difference and was not content to be merely a housewife. In the process she became the only woman to lead a political party in Great Britain, and become one of the longest serving Prime Ministers. She was a pillar of strength during the Cold War with the Soviet Union, stood up to the unions and broke their power, privatized state industries, reduced taxes, overcame inflation, defeated Argentina over the Falklands, and restored Britain’s economic prosperity. She stood for individual liberty and personal fiscal responsibility as over against government subsidies and deficit budgets. Her achievements were huge and not to be forgotten.

Yet, as you age, you are replaced and easily discounted. She was heavily criticized by the left and many in the media. She was envied by her colleagues for her forthright leadership, and resented by the male chauvinists who did not like a powerful woman. Eventually they succeeded in replacing her by John Major, who never lived up to her stature.

The movie dwells upon the contrast between the aged, declining Iron Lady and the salad days of her rise and triumphs. It is a moving reminder of our own mortality and the struggle of all of us to maintain our value as we age. I found it touching as Meryl Streep admirably portrayed Margaret Thatcher’s personal life: her close marriage partnership with Dennis, and her relationship with her two children, Mark and Carol. Like most parents there is the bitter and the sweet as Carol continues to care for her, and Mark is off in South Africa getting into trouble. The flashbacks of her early life are poignant. All of us can identify with them as we remember our own.

Psalm 90 is the prayer of Moses, the man of God. He too, reflects back on his long life and prays:

Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom. Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love, that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days. Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us, for as many years as we have seen trouble. May your deeds be shown to your servants, your splendor to their children. May the favor of the Lord God rest upon us; establish the work of our hands for us – yes, establish the work of our hands.

One of the tragedies of aging and death is that it interrupts our work and cuts short our achievement. That is why we must trust in the Lord to establish or continue what we have done that is good and worthwhile. He can prosper the work of our hands. The only work which lasts is that which God establishes. Our value, and the worth of what we do lies in him.

Perhaps the most moving moment in the movie was when Margaret Thatcher was about to enter 10 Downing Street for the first time as Prime Minister and she addresses the media using the words of the prayer of St. Francis:

Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Where there is hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope, where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy.

Now that is a witness that will endure and be an example to all her follow her in politics. This movie is as relevant to our politics today for the issues have not changed.

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